TeensInAI Space Apps Challenge: 2019

A question at TeensInAI is this: How do we enable teens, irrespective of their background to develop an interest in making impact products: digital-physical or digital? What is the best approach to immerse them in design-thinking, experience-design principles, coding, and making? How do we engage teenagers in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for social-impact product and design entrepreneurship?

Several approaches are at the disposal of TeensInAI. Co-creation workshops with actual users are one of many approaches. It is characterized by a mix of methods such as cultural immersion into the lives of others, role-play, storyboards, access to free and open-source-code, sketches, user-testing and lo-fi prototypes. It enables teens to dig deeper; identify multiple solutions; converge onto one idea; validate the idea.

Enter NASA Space Apps Challenge 2019.

Space Apps is an annual NASA global hackathon. It serves as an international innovation incubation and civic engagement program, for scientists, coders, designers, digital-makers, storytellers, filmmakers and technologists. Project teams use NASA’s free and open-source-data, creatively, to address social problems.

This year’s NASA’s hackathon in London was organized by Elena Sinel of TeensInAI, alongside her team of mentors and project managers. Thirty-odd teenagers came together at Onfido’s offices in London to look at problems (via NASA’s challenge) that affect the quality of people’s lives: from use of Artificial Intelligence to mitigate social behavior around plastic waste and pollution to the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence into the care of patients with chronic conditions. The goal was not to have them make their digital application or device but to help them understand the impact of social context and user-perspectives on their design decisions; the logic behind their code for seamless user experience.

Day one: participatory design-thinking

We organized the group of teenagers into five teams of five individuals. Each team included a coder or two in some cases. Mentors were on hand: A creative technologist to provide coding advice and a design-thinker to help frame the problem to solve were embedded in each team. This set-up allowed us to validate the viability of participatory design over a two-day hackathon (or as a 5-day design-sprint). I observed that in two days the design-thinking process helped teens participate to collectively make the mental switch from making sense of evidence and context to story-boarding, sketching, making lo-fi mock-ups to user-testing.

For a series of five-day design sprints, in the UK, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria for example with project partners and local education ecosystems we might look at the use of design thinking to:

1. Build an understanding and empathy with people that will be the users of any social project.

2. Determine research approaches with which to engage users of the social project: to identify, constraints, opportunities, and needs.

3. Generate ideas: prototypes – to bring in inclusive voices, identify locally workable solutions and reach out to groups that won’t usually come to workshops.

4. Develop solutions towards desired impact: test different exploration paths with the community of users and relevant stakeholders.

5. Understand areas within the education ecosystem that show promise in pedagogy that seeks to embrace technology.

Back to thirty plus teenagers, at Onfido.

For thirty plus teens who don’t know each other, it helps that we develop pathways that support collective responsibility, for social innovation. Teens can become digital urban planners of their environment. First off, we started the day by using the design-thinking process to prompt a get-to-know-one-another session. We gave them various tasks which require collective consideration. An example of such a task: they had to figure out which artifact out of a limited set of options is a must-have, should they find themselves stranded on a desert island. Each team saw the choice they need to make through the lens of survival on a desert island.

As a fun process, it followed these steps: address the problem from the view-point of each person on the team; question the brief to re-frame context in which the island exists; develop and consider multiple options for survival; settle on a solution and refine it. Children deliberate collectively, by making their ideas visual. They are taught in school that there is one answer. Here they learn and practice multiple pathways to solve problems. It’s an intro to teasing out their innate collective problem-solving traits. These are traits that cannot be automated. It’s a mindset required to connect dots effectively, among people who have different perspectives.

Each team connected dots between a menu of NASA “challenge questions” designed to appeal to a wide audience and their creative problem-solving capabilities. Topics in the menu of questions related to NASA’s Artemis program for a new Moon landing: a man and woman, by 2024; ideas for an orbital debris clean-up and making visible rising sea levels.

Day two: design and code for growth-hacking

When it came to coding we learned that it’s fun to co-design for impact to open teenagers’ ideas up for critique. The show-and-tell it to colleagues on other teams, and a panel of judges. However, at this point, it’s not critical to take a deep dive into software-engineering. Important attributes are attitudinal: developing an ability to connect dots socially and communicate with empathy, be passionate-about-problem solving, be-curious about lives beneficiaries of product live, and have fun doing it.

There is a difference between teenagers who were first-time coders and those exposed to code. Some of the teenagers had experimented with code before and had no problem using advice from a technology leader in their teams. Their key concern was a need for extra time to explore on their own. So, they tended to huddle away into a two-person sub-group to make sense of the code, concerning ideas generated by their team. The freshers took guidance on code from a technology lead, enough for them to follow their experienced colleagues as they play the algorithm game: Allowing each team to jointly evolve practical outlines for their concepts.

Whilst validation continued throughout the process, with mentors and project managers wearing users’ shoes, each team toyed with growth hacking. They toyed with different brand marketing messages, then tailored content to attract users’ feedback to their application and its’ associated service. This is where service design or design applications begin to use evidence from usability tests to improve learning outcomes, design strategy, and design practice.

As there was a contest element a panel of judges filtered outcomes through the lens of some questions: What does a user profile look like? What’s the relevance of the application to the needs of different user-profiles and how do the teams decide who is and who is not a target audience? How well are the concepts defined, in terms of impact? What types of creative research formats are deployed for user-testing? Is a minimum viable product valid? Is there a story behind a development road-map? Which feature sets are critical and are sufficient?

Pitch, one road-trip stop at a time

Two projects developed during this hackathon are on a show and tell road-trip at the time of writing. The road trip stop list includes several players in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning space across the UK, that might support a growth-hack program. A recent stop: #Futurebanking at Barclays’ HQ in Canary Wharf London, two teams presented their minimum viable prototypes to London’s Fintech community and teams responsible for the bank’s cloud-based technology programs.